Released this week for your eyeballing pleasure is a uniquely approachable film (justifiably fêted about the festivals this year) about the specific yet impossibly creative world of game making. Indie Game: The Movie, independent by name, independent by nature is a documentary that follows the makers of Fez, Braid and Super Meat Boy – the autonomous (and frequently solitary) souls who spend an extreme amount of life on improving our gaming landscapes. We see them freak-out over finances, girls, girls and finances and the perpetual self-deprecation universal to all creatives and artists who have the balls to make something for the world they live in, even if they don’t get to enjoy it.

These aren’t happy glitches from our friend Google Maps, these are Deconstructing the Churches by Michael Jantzen. Working in the hypothetical and art-based architecture realm, Michael’s work explores and fragments existing realities using a simple rotation device to brilliant and destabilising effect. Why he’s chosen churches specifically I’m not quite sure, but we can all make up our own minds and I’m going to go with profane photoshop.

Icinori is the publishing studio of illustrators Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller and theirs is an operation of the most worthy – make books, sell books, fund next project. It means they keep costs down and their independence, with the content of the books, of course, being subject only to the restrictions of their own illustrative fancies.

“Small cities need no fashion” they say, and what’s more, “the moment you try to make everybody like you is the moment of your art-suicide.” Bold words spoken to Urban Outfitters by Ukranian photography duo Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova, so it would be a sad thing if their images lacked that intensity of individuality. Really then I should thank them for my happy morning thus far. Thanks, Synchrodogs (that’s their pseudonym, not my pet name).

If Daniel Gordon’s current work in the Saatchi Gallery’s exhibition, Out of Focus is anything to go by, we’re supposed to consider these works as photographs and for all intents and purposes they are. But the incredibly involved montage of images within the frame, the unrecognisable surfaces – sometimes with a glitchy trace of their online origins that clashes wonderfully with the sharp relief of a real object – coupled with the use of lighting and props and composition, means they’re more like sculpture, or at the least, 3D collage.

“I often feel like I am in over my head” says Colin Doyle of our image-saturated culture, “as if my actions, my existence, and my work are of little importance.” But then Colin’s photographs might fall quite aesthetically into the aggregators ambit, and could very well be described as Tumblr-friendly works, full of the ambiguity of objects regularly encountered but rarely seen in such sculptural contexts. They concentrate on a moment that breaks the commonplace of the thing – the shatter in the glass, the murk of close weather obscuring buildings, the desiccating mango, etc – and in doing so the artist comes to terms with his self-perceived “insignificance,” the “randomness, and the perception of reality.”

Switzerland-based, ink-happy Pierre(PierrePierre) Dubois has a monochrome but broad visual currency of iterative short, sharp lines and painted fills. These marks make up drawings that describe spectacularly but not quite in the reportage way – it’s a style that might otherwise be restricted to offhand observations in sketchbooks, but these are stand-alone works with a remarkable quality of detail. In particular, I can’t get over his landscape view of things, the clear-line way of working creates a pretty fascinating marked surface that all at once flattens and adds depth to the image.

Full credit to Jacob Escobedo: For his gig posters and record covers used by the likes of Broken Bells, The Shins, Gnarls Barkley and Vampire Weekend. For creative directing Adult Swim and for taking for photographs which have character cameos from Kanye West and David Lynch (exclusively, hanging out). And finally for his contributions to The New Yorker’s June issue, illustrations with a science fiction bent, accompanying articles by the genre behemoths like Ursula k. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood and, most extraordinarily, the final published piece by Ray Bradbury, released the day before his passing.

Curtis Baigent is doing smart things with simple visual devices and a playful reuse of old school gamer/sign painter type. His latest piece of creative that he directed, art directed and designed as part of studio Les Télécréateurs is a title sting for France 5’s new archeology show “totally randomly” titled Archéologie. Aside from a bright, smart and engaging 30 second film, Curtis provides developmental shots and individual frames that prove the work’s graphic mettle by working as well as a still as a piece of moving image.

Photography and art direction duo Matthieu Lavanchy and Jonas Marguet have joined forces once again for the latest Muse issue of Verities magazine. Theirs is a visual essay which, as is their way, tells a strange fiction concocted between objects and colour and set in a hyper-surreality. The extraordinary appeal in the images lies in the close association they have with meticulously observed still life paintings and/or a noir, Lynch-ian set piece. Both of which pose cinematic intrigue about the precise meaning of their composition and sequence but, for the most part, are just spectacularly aesthetic.

The Jullien Brothers are forging ahead happily by doing wonderful things with winning characters, costumes, sets and animations. Their latest is a heart squeezing short for the San Francisco SPCA which features a man-puppy so unfortunate as to be bred for sale on the internet. As well as being an impossibly good feat in puppetry (the brothers’ best yet) with neat editing and canny use of smoke machines, the story is delivered in a dangerously catchy song that has me singing “what a crime, what a cryyyyyme” over and over in my head and sometimes – much to the delight of those nearby – randomly out-loud.

The writer/director team Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp aka The Theory put themselves firmly in the forward-animation spectrum with their brilliantly innovative (and viral) Address is Approximate film last year. Their latest offering Speed of Light is no less ingenious in its effort to tell a good story using unique methods, this time with projection mapping on a tiny scale. Using the smallest “pocket video projectors” and some crafty, CGI-free editing, they directed a Lilliputian jail-break and tiniest ever police car chase across a random interior that sees everyday items help and hinder the dramatic race. Lovely stuff.

Wonderful new work by Gwénola Carrerè, the Brussels-based illustrator with a Russian folk aesthetic that uses the stylistic restraints of silkscreen printing and a colour palette reserved for children’s books. Her latest poster work is for the Festival Solstice Arts du Cirque happening next week and it is an exemplar treat from a body of work that specialises in the vibrantly engaging graphics for modern musical folklorists and the like. Gwénola is a creative whose appeal covers children and adults, traditionalists and those who appreciate a good contemporary digital craft, which is very well likely down to her impossible knack for telling a story in a single frame.

It’s been long enough since we had the pleasure of posting Hannah Waldron’s illustrations, in which time her kit-like set of structural expressions have developed, even more, into a highly tangible, woven visual language that offers up a very contemporary take on some traditional and alternative story-telling mediums. We spoke to her briefly about how her work sits now in comparison to her more conventional mark-on-paper days, and the effect this development will have on future works.

What does the digital studio love-child of Ryder Internet Archeology Ripps and Jonathan Vingiano look like? OKFocus – a remarkably ingenious portfolio of web wonders and playfully professional design solutions for the most contemporary of internet thinkers.

Having experienced instantaneous joy the moment I laid eyes on his black marker “whateverism” style, I encourage you all to visit the site of Egyboy. Working the DIY poster aesthetic with happy abandon and with excellent brevity of detail, he is a "pencil boy pushing free hand dirty drawings with ironic slogans and “rough texture”" -–add to that a sense of humour and an encouragingly irreverent comic and he might just be the best thing that will happen to me/you/posters today.

With his unlimited access to patients in an exodontia (tooth extraction) unit of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital, Andy Brown has created a series of dual portraits. The first is taken in the waiting room before the procedure, the youngsters’ faces the very definition of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and then in the recovery room, immediately after regaining consciousness, with their small features woozy and slightly collapsed by the sedation, occasionally with the slightly grim blood traces of the operation.

In her twenties Tabitha Soren was one of the faces of MTV News, “a very loud, pressure-filled time for me” she confesses. Now, that time she spent in front of the camera stands as a marked difference to how she uses it today; winking through a lens, working with one frame of narrative-laden potential at a time. We last featured her ongoing Uprooted project, photographs that see her return to the same spots in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck, and now with her large-scale Running series on show at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA), we caught up with her to hear more about where these dramatic, landscape-interrupted works arrived from.

Laura Pannack has a genuine affinity for portrait photography and she widens her lens to include landscape as part of the character of her sitters. They are contemplative works, quietly magnetic to look at and have been recognised as much by quite a number of estimable awards including the Portraits Singles category of the World Press Photo awards. This week we welcome her to the Bookshelf slot and her five top tomes.

Unfortunately the Atlantic (that pesky pond) is between me and some life affirming-ly good art as highlighted recently on the site with a Land Art retrospective at MOCA’s Geffin Contemporary. While perusing for that post, another exhibition at the same gallery came to my attention, Sky Ladder by Cai Guo-Qiang.

This week saw the opening of Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at The Geffin Contemporary; the first “historical-thematic” of its kind to deal with Land Art and its exciting emergence in the 1960s. The exhibition is justifiably broad and is being accompanied by a brilliant online catalogue to help contextualise the works by the various and ambitious artists.

Let us all now direct our collective attention to the bay area and the ineffable delight that is Erik Marinovich’s new website. Before I gush something terrible about his lettering/design work, let us first acknowledge the San Franciscan’s co-founding status of Friends of Type (previously enthused about here) and one half of the studio Titlecase made whole by fellow letterer Jessica “Daily Drop Cap” Hische.

In an perpetuating series of beautiful and abstract stills, animations, films and applied graphics, Dextro – an original internet artist – has been using the most basic of visual tropes even the earliest web-ready computer could offer; generative algorithms, boid-like figurations and specific pixel display. And with them he has created some of the most extraordinary images that are analogous of so many things in the real world, like waves and light and sand dunes and other poetic commonalities and it’s ongoing! If you haven’t come across this work before, though you’re likely to have seen his imitators, then now is the time to let the almost meditative cumulative artworks remind you of how freaky-cool technology was/is/will be.

Graphic designers who work with arty or poetic content will always tend toward creating something ambiguous but Frankfurt-based duo Doeller & Satter (Sandra Doeller and Michael Satter) handle it with a real brevity of typographic composition, a keen and bright use of colour, formatted for traditional printed matter but with a consistent contemporary edge.

Dave Cooper is a fine cartoonist with an oil-painter’s palette and a sophisticatedly puerile sense of humour. He appears to specialise in characters with glassy, lilly-pad pupils that reflect an eternal window, women with excellent constitutions and fleshy parts (breasts, buttocks, eyeballs) that act independently from the rest of their body, anthropomorphs and crowd scenes.

In his letter responding to an invite from the estimable Sarabhai family to stay with them in Ahmedabad, Alexander Calder wrote “It is very cold here, and so we will be delighted to come where it is warmer, but the great delight is to see India, and to meet you and your family. Cordially Sandy.”

Kate Morrell is part artist, part archeologist with her concern for artefacts and appropriated histories. Her latest, a book entitled Alpine Spoilers, is a selective amalgamation of the final words of mountaineering memoirs held in The Armitt Library (who commissioned the work), deftly drawing “the aesthetic canons of romanticism and the real possible outcomes of pain and death” into a weighted finale.

Gracing the cover of the latest issue of Varoom is the Zurich-based illustrator and/or graphic designer (graphic illustrator?) Stephan Walter. Though it’s his process that makes him hard to pin-down – vector drawings constructed in 3D because sometimes 2D just isn’t enough – his tech-knowledge base is more akin to an architect or engineer with the level of detail he can achieve in each work.

Given the opportunity and such inexplicably good weather that we’re enjoying euro-side, the coast is a necessary destination and in particular, the Belgian coast where the fourth edition of the Triennial of Contemporary Art (Beaufort04) is taking place.

Here is a portfolio with an emphasis on printable material presented on a smart, colour-changing website that proves Paul Bernhard has the new-tradition for graphic design nailed; which is to say it works as well online as it does offline no matter what medium it was designed for.

For illustrators like Milan-based Emiliano Ponzi, working with the written word is a mainstay of creativity. For him in particular, the creating editorial illustration for the upper echelons of objective journalism cannot be as simple a task his work lets us assume; indeed, communicating complex notions is rare with such “judicious use of line” and such immediate graphic effect as Emiliano achieves. Surely, this ability to visualise concepts must arrive from an understanding of words unattainable to us mere non-illustrators? Who knows but perhaps his selection of five books for our Bookshelf feature might shed some light?

I’m going to go ahead and assume that all other places of work foster the same strange fascination myself and my colleagues have with each other’s lunches. Our editor, for example, inexplicably eats two of everything, one of the directors goes through a lot of pate and the other day someone from design ate burger and chips in a wrap. For me though, it’s all about the vessel. I thought I’d found it, the perfect container – an enamel tiffin with compartments and carry handle – but then the internet presented me with Utilitarian Ceramic by Ben Fiess and I was left wanting.

The term psychedelia translates as “soul-manifesting” – a quite lovely notion of aesthetic potential. Lovelier still is Sakuramadelica, an ongoing photography project from Takeshi Suga whose woozy chromatic shots of sakura – ornamental cherry blossoms – fill the screen with the saturated colours of summer and spring and all things good in the world.

Manuel Birnbacher’s practice is a curious amalgam of smart, contemporary graphic design and strangely compulsive art-like-work (see the throbbing rock on his homepage). A portfolio like this is an open and well-spoken answer to some nasally voiced questions about the parameters of applied design and when it turns into “art” or Art or art.

I very recently came across the perfect example to hold up when trying to explain just how good woodblock printing can be and in comparison, how Katsuyuki Nishijima makes the efforts by some other artists look like potato prints.

The Wide Open School is just that, an inclusive and experimental programme for public learning. The Hayward Gallery is hosting it as part of the Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World, and they have gathered an estimable faculty of some of the UK’s most contemporary artists – Martin Creed, Tracy Emin, Jeremy Deller, Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Bob and Roberta Smith for example – as well as another 94 artists hailing from more than 40 countries.

Alex Witjas’ work over at Urban Outfitters as a designer for the last few years has plumped out her portfolio with applied design on everything from employee badges to product styling and set concepts. The smart typographic treatment, playful illustrative elements and near-edible colours work together in one of the most coherent and charming bodies of work I’ve seen for a long time. Staring at Alex’s work, the term “creative all-rounder” has never sounded so un-lame.

The latest music video for My Best Fiend, Cracking Eggs, brilliantly choreographs curious mini-performances with everyday materials in a totally non-cringe and experimental way. Behind the curiousness is one of our favourite photographers, Jeremy Liebman, who has more than an eye for the immediate and so it’s always interesting to see him working with such premeditated aesthetics. And he has been working closely with French creative duo JSBJ, Aurelien Arbet and Jeremie Egry, to realise this strange and super engaging few minutes in which actual smoke and mirrors are used to excellent effect. We caught up with Jeremy to hear a little more about play and fruitful collaboration.

After an enjoyably long time in the personal chapter of Matt Hass’ portfolio it’s hard to tell what’s real or not in his images; they’ve got a bit of cinematic noir about them with their uncannily-lit visions of utter randomness that must be staged but are so effortless they just can’t be. Dirty snow falls off a dark building, mirrors reflect architecture but look like open windows, serendipitous colour matching, night photography in which light becomes solid, day photography in which light dissolves solids – all sorts of visual trickery teamed up with those inexplicable moments of aesthetic happenstance. Matt Hass’ work is good, very good, but then surely that is no accident.